The purpose of this post is to illustrate an interesting capability of the Fibaro HC2 in managing some very specific devices that are not originally made to be manage by the HC2 ! This post is the second part of my initial post related to virtual device management.

The objective is to activate the camera motion detector and the automatic send email function through a script and make available the building blocks for an alarm system.

The purpose of this post is to illustrate an interesting capability of the Fibaro HC2 in managing some very specific devices that are not originally made to be manage by the HC2 ! An IP camera like the Foscam FI8910W presented in my previous post (Improving home security with video monitoring) is a good example for the usage of “virtual device”. The objective is to activate the camera motion detector and the automatic send email function through a script and make available the building blocks for an alarm system.

Here are the constraints when using the HC2 with version 1.046:

– Using the graphical script builder, there is NO specific IP camera command for motion detector & email. The only available command is take a picture !

– Virtual device is therefore a good solution to communicate/send orders to the IP camera through “virtual buttons”.

Let’s consider our IP camera “foscam2” located in the kitchen. The “V-foscam2” is the virtual device associated to this camera. This V-foscam2 has 3 buttons or functionalities:

Let’s improve the home security with monitoring the main entrance door: whenever the door is open then 2 pictures, with 5 sec interval, are sent to a given address. We will use a Foscam FI8910W and the Fibaro HC2.

The detailed workflow of the script would be:

(i) The HSM02 door contact detector is armed

(ii) The HSM02 detects a breach at time T0.

(iii) The video camera takes a picture at T0 and send the file by email

(iv) The video camera takes a second picture at T0 + 5 sec and send the file by email

The HC2 manages well IP video camera as a special device: IP camera is not like the other z-wave based device since there is no z-wave technology embedded in the IP camera! Therefore the inclusion process of an IP camera is different: you only need the IP address and login/password of the camera.

I selected the FI8910W IP camera from Foscam because of the following:

The security set-up and monitoring of my house is an important target. This should include various devices like motion detector, door/window contact detector, video monitoring, smoke detector, etc. Let’s start with a very modest configuration of the Fibaro HC2 and we will improve it by adding some other functionality!

My first goal is to monitor the opening of the main entrance door and get a notification by email whenever the door is opened. Activate/Deactivate the device through a Fibaro script.

I have selected the door/window contact detector HSM02 from Everspring which is a Z-Wave enabled device and compatible with the Fibaro HC2.

Let’s start the set-up of our HC2. The configuration of my house is straight forward and I have decided to define 3 main zones (or area or section):
(i) Maison (the house)
(ii) Jardin (the garden)
(iii) Garage (no translation needed !)
And within each zone, we can have a set of rooms. Please note that there is no concept of sub-zone within a predefined zone within the current version of HC2.

For the time being, I have started the design of the first zone called “Maison” where we have 6 rooms or areas: Salon, Chambre parentale, Salle de bain, Cuisine, Couloir and Chambre invite. Each room must be linked with one zone which is “Maison” in our case.

Good – once you have received the precious box, the set-up is straight forward and I will not spend time on the hardware part of the HC2 and any way a lot of websites can give you this kind of presentation. I am more interested to share with you some more “real life” issue or advantage in managing the HC2.

To start with, I work on a mac based environment and my media center is a mac mini. Once the HC2 is connected to the network, my first challenge was to find his IP address ! There is a PC windows tool that can help finding the IP address but nothing with Mac OSX. It would be great if Figaro could provide a similar tool for Mac users.

After a few guess on the bar address of Firefox starting from 192.168.1.XX, I had access to the HC2 login page